The only thing they could hurt by doing so is their short-term quarterly profits. I highly doubt we're going to see the new voicelines this year which means expected profits to be made during this last quarter will be less if they announce that people can simply wait.
I'm sure if they end up not doing it, community pressure will force them to change their minds. I'll help fight that battle if we need to.
I cannot wait for Hearthstone to explore Pandaria! There are so many amazing themes there, creatures, and general fun. They could make an entire adventure just about Nomi learning to be a chef from the ground up!
Plus, we need some serious Sha in Hearthstone. It could be an entire mechanic.
How in the world is September already over? Jeeze. I was forced to deploy an update out today to hopefully get accepted into the Riot API program for Legends of Runeterra, so there's some stuff in the update that isn't completely finished - touch on that in a moment.
New Features
General
New account login and registration pages!
Added member tooltips.
The mouseover of any username on the site will now display a special tooltip. (Sorry, mobile)
No more borders around the images for a much cleaner look.
Improved the appearance of comments below articles and forum posts.
Blockquotes have improved styling.
Our quotes for different game developers now have special themes.
Magic
Cards database is now linked in the site footer.
Hearthstone
Staff can now designate source links for decks.
We've previously used the guide space for this which in turn flags the deck as having a guide.
With the new feature, we'll link to relevant tweets or videos that we can get decks from to share here. These links will display in a special box in the same spot a guide would.
Staf can now more easily flag pro players.
This one is for you, Frosty.
Runeterra
Deck widgets now display deck copy buttons for easier access.
Bug Fixes
General
Fixed an issue where New Threads on the game portals sorted incorrectly.
Report buttons no longer display for logged-out users.
Hearthstone
Fixed an issue with missing "Hearthstone" breadcrumbs on deck pages.
Runeterra
Fixed the deck widget caching incorrectly.
Card detail pages now display their card image when linked on Discord or other social platforms as intended.
Decks on the deck listings can no longer display more than 4 champions. (Decks may still have more than 4 different champions)
The wild cards were fun for a little bit, but they were here for too long. If they did it for a certain week, I could accept that more than the entire month (or two in the previous case).
I have no reason to believe Second Dinner and Secret Door are working on anything together.
How long from founding to market or at least announcement? It depends. So far they have made no announcements other than they are working with Marvel and they've secured a bunch of funding.
The odds of us seeing an announcement from Second Dinner long before they actually release something is slim. If they announce a project too early, it lets competitors potentially beat them to market. There isn't really a good benchmark to know when we should expect an announcement. They are still expanding core positions on their team which leads me to believe its still early on in the development cycle. We also don't know the scope of their game (is it a smaller card game like Hearthstone or is it something more crazy like an RTS which tons of moving parts) so comparing them to other studios is tough.
Hell, even Hearthstone being as small of a game as it is took 5 years to get to the announcement stage from the initial creation of Team 5 in 2008. Some of that might be inexperience, I know Starcraft II moved a bunch of early team members off of Hearthstone to work on that, which isn't a hurdle Second Dinner should have.
I'm hoping we see an announcement later next year from Second Dinner. I'm so hungry!
Sorry, this took a little bit longer than expected to get up this morning, this is fantastic news. I knew Mike wasn't about that retirement life, especially not with how things turned out at Blizzard.
I cannot wait to see what these awesome people create. With Bonfire Studios from Rob Pardo, Second Dinner from Ben Brode and gang, and now Dreamhaven with Mike Morhaime, we've now got 4 teams (since Dreamhaven has 2 studios) that are going to be working on assumingly great products. I love how Mike has said "fuck that" to chasing short-term financial pressure.
I'm also excited that we'll be able to cover stuff in the future :eyes:
I'm expecting a Year of the <zodiac> announcement as a bare minimum. Going heavy into details on it would be great use of their time. I would also love to see them announce the April expansion, but I'm also afraid they may not only because that would be 6-7 weeks before its actual launch, which isn't a timeline Hearthstone has used in a while since it "kills hype".
I hope we do see an expansion announcement though, and I hope the start of next year is so full of content that they can string us along for those many weeks with more announcements.
I'm really looking forward to how they end up structuring this. I'm curious if virtual ticket is still going to be a requirement if said virtual ticket might be discounted if it is still a thing, and if there is going to be any Esports component at all.
I could see there being no esports for 1 less thing going on that weekend (for each game doing esports) and it would shift focus entirely to the content each game is highlighting potentially boosting virtual ticket sales.
I'm also curious if this does well, will it mean we'll see more BlizzConline events on years where they don't have a ton of major announcements so they don't need to rent the con? Or perhaps smaller BlizzConline events during the year (halfway between BlizzCons maybe?) as a way to get a bunch of Blizzard announcements into the wild for an upcoming HS expansion, a WoW patch, and so on. Would be a lot of fun to have another Blizzard-filled weekend in the year.
I definitely bought it for completion's sake. I can't chance the hero portrait never being available again.
I hope this whole thing was a word of warning though for Blizzard and I hope the sales reflected it. People want new voice lines if you're paying. This portrait honestly should have been a reward for playing the adventure in a Heroic setting.
I also agree on the Iceblast thing. Its so lame we aren't getting special effect hero powers =(
About decks, I wonder how well positioned are OoC's decks in Google.
It's really tough to compete on that end when you have sites dominating the listing due to being around for at least 6 years, unfortunately. Hearthstone is an oversaturated market with a declining playerbase =(
Wouldn't that be grand!
The only thing they could hurt by doing so is their short-term quarterly profits. I highly doubt we're going to see the new voicelines this year which means expected profits to be made during this last quarter will be less if they announce that people can simply wait.
I'm sure if they end up not doing it, community pressure will force them to change their minds. I'll help fight that battle if we need to.
Ragnaros is 100% going to get nerfed in the next balance patch. I have no idea why they thought that was a good idea to push live.
I cannot wait for Hearthstone to explore Pandaria! There are so many amazing themes there, creatures, and general fun. They could make an entire adventure just about Nomi learning to be a chef from the ground up!
Plus, we need some serious Sha in Hearthstone. It could be an entire mechanic.
How in the world is September already over? Jeeze. I was forced to deploy an update out today to hopefully get accepted into the Riot API program for Legends of Runeterra, so there's some stuff in the update that isn't completely finished - touch on that in a moment.
New Features
General
Mythgard
Hearthstone
Changes
General
Magic
Hearthstone
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
General
Hearthstone
Runeterra
Sorry, that was bad copy job. Fixed
Interestingly, the threaten line is from the adventure. It's the only adventure-specific one that is on the playable hero.
I've gotten pretty good at drawing correct lines over the years :)
Unless something changes, these are attached to the playable version of Rexxar.
The wild cards were fun for a little bit, but they were here for too long. If they did it for a certain week, I could accept that more than the entire month (or two in the previous case).
Welcome!
Every time without fail!
I have no reason to believe Second Dinner and Secret Door are working on anything together.
How long from founding to market or at least announcement? It depends. So far they have made no announcements other than they are working with Marvel and they've secured a bunch of funding.
The odds of us seeing an announcement from Second Dinner long before they actually release something is slim. If they announce a project too early, it lets competitors potentially beat them to market. There isn't really a good benchmark to know when we should expect an announcement. They are still expanding core positions on their team which leads me to believe its still early on in the development cycle. We also don't know the scope of their game (is it a smaller card game like Hearthstone or is it something more crazy like an RTS which tons of moving parts) so comparing them to other studios is tough.
Hell, even Hearthstone being as small of a game as it is took 5 years to get to the announcement stage from the initial creation of Team 5 in 2008. Some of that might be inexperience, I know Starcraft II moved a bunch of early team members off of Hearthstone to work on that, which isn't a hurdle Second Dinner should have.
I'm hoping we see an announcement later next year from Second Dinner. I'm so hungry!
Most people are from Hearthstone, Starcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. Those are the easy guesses!
Sorry, this took a little bit longer than expected to get up this morning, this is fantastic news. I knew Mike wasn't about that retirement life, especially not with how things turned out at Blizzard.
I cannot wait to see what these awesome people create. With Bonfire Studios from Rob Pardo, Second Dinner from Ben Brode and gang, and now Dreamhaven with Mike Morhaime, we've now got 4 teams (since Dreamhaven has 2 studios) that are going to be working on assumingly great products. I love how Mike has said "fuck that" to chasing short-term financial pressure.
I'm also excited that we'll be able to cover stuff in the future :eyes:
I'm 99% sure I have the exact order they'll release in, just need to make a news article for it :D
Only paid entries =(
I'm expecting a Year of the <zodiac> announcement as a bare minimum. Going heavy into details on it would be great use of their time. I would also love to see them announce the April expansion, but I'm also afraid they may not only because that would be 6-7 weeks before its actual launch, which isn't a timeline Hearthstone has used in a while since it "kills hype".
I hope we do see an expansion announcement though, and I hope the start of next year is so full of content that they can string us along for those many weeks with more announcements.
3 days after my Birthday. I'll take it, Blizzard!
I'm really looking forward to how they end up structuring this. I'm curious if virtual ticket is still going to be a requirement if said virtual ticket might be discounted if it is still a thing, and if there is going to be any Esports component at all.
I could see there being no esports for 1 less thing going on that weekend (for each game doing esports) and it would shift focus entirely to the content each game is highlighting potentially boosting virtual ticket sales.
I'm also curious if this does well, will it mean we'll see more BlizzConline events on years where they don't have a ton of major announcements so they don't need to rent the con? Or perhaps smaller BlizzConline events during the year (halfway between BlizzCons maybe?) as a way to get a bunch of Blizzard announcements into the wild for an upcoming HS expansion, a WoW patch, and so on. Would be a lot of fun to have another Blizzard-filled weekend in the year.
I definitely bought it for completion's sake. I can't chance the hero portrait never being available again.
I hope this whole thing was a word of warning though for Blizzard and I hope the sales reflected it. People want new voice lines if you're paying. This portrait honestly should have been a reward for playing the adventure in a Heroic setting.
I also agree on the Iceblast thing. Its so lame we aren't getting special effect hero powers =(
It's really tough to compete on that end when you have sites dominating the listing due to being around for at least 6 years, unfortunately. Hearthstone is an oversaturated market with a declining playerbase =(